silent red desert valley of sandstone
and granite. It was the stomping
ground of Lawrence of Arabia and
the shooting location of The Martian,
a recent Matt Damon film. It is one
of the most hauntingly beautiful
places I’ve ever been.

One of my travel mates was Ed
Langlois, a reporter for the Catholic
Sentinel, from a place so different
than Wadi Rum—the moist, green,
gentle land of Portland, Oregon. Ed
mused about how the desert landscape, humbling in its starkness,
must have shaped its people’s understanding of God. Their God needed
to be strong and very definitively on
their side if they were to survive.

While in Wadi Rum, our group
was in the care of Bedouin, the
nomadic tribespeople who live there,
and indeed they took lavish care of
transporting, feeding, and sheltering
us. Good thing, because I was acutely aware that I wouldn’t have lasted a
day in this desert without them and
their know-how—an experience of
being vulnerable to those, or One,
who will look after me.

I glimpsed the Promised Land from
the same spot Moses did—atop
Mount Nebo—and like Moses, I
did not enter it. I haven’t been to
Israel and hope to go someday, and
I’m now glad I went to Jordan first.

It was an opportunity to reflect onthe necessity of preparation beforereaching a destination, that it’s abso-to visit this country that figures sosignificantly in both the Old andNew Testaments.

Before that moment, it had never
crossed my mind to go to Jordan. I
had never thought of it as part of the
Holy Land. But Jordan is the literal
wilderness referenced throughout
scripture where so many trials and
transitions occurred. Jordan was a
place of retreat and revelation for
Israelites, Jews, and early Christians.

Our salvation history begins with an
Exodus into the desert, continues
with the desert wanderings of John
the Baptist, and culminates with the
desert temptations and teachings
of Jesus. As a layperson who writes
about vocation, I felt urged to explore firsthand how the desert relates
to discernment.

If your spiritual journey hastaken you somewhere barren,you are in good company.

A few months after the conference, Christine organized a press trip
specifically for Catholic writers and
invited me to join. I’ll admit I was
a little scared to go somewhere so
unfamiliar. But that tinge of fear also
helped me decide to go. All spiritual
journeys start that way, with fear of
the unknown. Perhaps that’s even
what compels us to go on them in
the first place: There’s something
uncertain inside us, a question that
demands an answer, an agitation that
moves us forward.

Get lostOne of the best parts of this incred-ible trip included a visit to WadiRum, a seemingly endless and eerily